A supreme dud for workers

Demonstrators embrace as they react to hearing the Supreme Court's decision on the Hobby Lobby case outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Monday, June 30, 2014. The Supreme Court says corporations can hold religious objections that allow them to opt out of the new health law requirement that they cover contraceptives for women.(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
The Associated Press

Demonstrators embrace as they react to hearing the Supreme Court's decision on the Hobby Lobby case outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Monday, June 30, 2014. The Supreme Court says corporations can hold religious objections that allow them to opt out of the new health law requirement that they cover contraceptives for women.(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

There may be a few Americans whose lives will change because of Monday’s 5-4 Supreme Court ruling, which said family-owned corporations can invoke religious objections to exclude four out of 20 medically approved forms of contraception from their workers’ health plans.

To be sure, politicians seeking national office and talk-radio hosts will make plenty of noise. The uproar has already started.

But for nearly everybody else — particularly workers and business owners — the Hobby Lobby decision was no big deal.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said the high court’s decision was “very specific” to the case at hand, arguing that women can have “cost-free access to the particular contraceptives at issue here” even if employers object on religious grounds.

Alito was referring to objections lodged most prominently by David Green and family members who own Hobby Lobby, a retail chain based in Oklahoma City that sells arts-and-crafts supplies.

The Greens sued to overturn part of the Affordable Care Act. Better known as Obamacare, it requires employer health plans to cover women’s preventive care, although the wording is vague.

In regulations, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services interpreted the law to require all 20 federally approved forms of contraception. Four of these prevent a fertilized egg from successfully attaching to the womb.

The mechanism is tantamount to ending a human life, say Hobby Lobby’s owners, who argued that making them pay for it violated their freedom of religious expression under a 1993 federal law.

Notably, the company continued to pay for the 16 birth-control methods that prevent conception.

Nobody questions the Greens’ desire to operate Hobby Lobby according to their view of Christian principles. For example, they close stores on Sundays and won’t sell or promote alcohol, giving up millions in revenue.

Yet whether religious conviction is sincere or not is beside the point, Alito wrote. So is the question of whether, or under what conditions, a corporation has the rights of a person under the Constitution.

The federal government has already granted Obamacare exceptions to churches and nonprofits.

HHS rules let them buy health plans without objectionable birth control, and then it falls to insurance companies to provide the benefits at no cost to women or the employer.

Congress clearly wanted women to receive contraception at no cost when it passed Obamacare, so HHS could easily grant the same exemption to for-profit companies, Alito said. Or the government could simply pay for contraception itself.

What’s more, Alito cited precedents to make one point crystal clear: Just like individuals, companies can’t use freedom of religion to avoid paying taxes, engage in illegal discrimination, use illegal drugs or anything else that falls outside the public interest, as defined by legislators.

But that sanguine view was a long way from the slippery slope seen by the court minority.

Here’s how Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg began her dissent: “In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.”